"Time is short, and suddenly you are not there any more."
RIP Albert Finney.
Actor hailed as the new Olivier but who preferred playing working-class heroes to classical roles.
So long, then, to the original ‘angry young man.’
The death of actor and Salford boy Albert Finney on February 8, 2019, brought my rather extended Christmas to a somewhat poignant end. And it reminded me of a lesson I've learned the hard way: Everything and everyone is gone all too soon, and gone all the sooner the less you appreciate them.
The quote heading this piece is from the musical version of Scrooge, in which Albert Finney played the title role.
I watched this film for the first time from my hospital bed in Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital, Christmas 2016. A Christmas Carol is the only Dickens novel I like, really, and I love the Alastair Sim film of 1951, Scrooge. That's one of my essential Christmas films. I'd always been somewhat put off by the idea of a musical version, and so had never actually seen the Albert Finney version from 1970. It didn't appeal. But in hospital recovering from a heart attack, I was somewhat restricted in my choices and had to make the most of what came my way on the TV. It was on, and I was evidently going nowhere. So I watched it. And loved it. Albert Finney's performance grabbed me from the start, and never let go. And to my surprise I quite enjoyed the routines, too. And just as things were getting a little too down and depressing, with all these debts and ghosts, poverty and meanness, we were treated to the irresistible jollity of “Thank You Very Much,” first performed in very dark humour, and finally performed with Mr. Scrooge's redemption. I even felt like breaking out in a jig myself. Good film. I watch it every Christmas now.
It was an odd situation for me, spending Christmas in a hospital bed after a close escape with the other side, but the film came with a message I took home with me:
“It sounds a bit bizarre
But things the way they are
I feel as if another life's begun for me.”
(You can find the song on You Tube, the first performance and the reprise. Just watch the entire film to get the benefit.)
That was very much how I felt as I lay there contemplating what could have been, and very nearly was, and the many reasons as to why I'd ended up in this mess in the first place. Years and years working too hard at things that, really, are a distraction from life. Who reads? Who listens? Who learns? Who, really, is so bothered? I really have had better things to be doing with my time over the years.
Although that lesson remains, I have found it not as easy to act on as it may seem. Through stress and pressure of a work that, in the wider scheme of things, is of no importance whatsoever, I very nearly ended up in hospital again this last Christmas. As it was, I spent a couple of months from early December to February undergoing tests. Never again.
It just begs the question of what form of idolatry you preoccupy yourself with, what futile things you allow to absorb your time like a sponge, wasting your life away in the process: what diversion or distraction do you engage in to avoid life and its living? Identify it and get rid of it. With Scrooge it was money. Thomas Hobbes described words as the money of fools. Between you and reality is just a lot of things hardly worth wasting breath on.
As for my extended Christmas, read a continually postponed Christmas. I was taken into hospital by emergency ambulance early in December with a suspected heart attack, kept in for tests, released, and called back in for cardiograms, angiograms and who knows what else in the weeks following, lasting into February. Hence my extended Christmas, with celebration/relaxation being constantly put back. Christmas is the time of the year when I take a break, relax, and recharge my batteries. I've not been able to do it this year. Indeed, even when I've been able to snatch well deserved breaks, either in Wales or participating in festivals, I've not been able to shut out interference and encroachment on my time. And I am livid. I am now being advised on stress, what it is and how to eliminate it. I will anticipate the results of these medical tests by saying that my ills are not physical - I am prepared to state openly that I am in a good physical shape. I believe the medics will eliminate all physical causes of my complaints, leaving me with the responsibility to identify and eliminate the sources of stress that are the origin of my difficulties.
I feel like a new life has begun, and this time I will make sure that things get done that are worth doing, and that things left undone remain so, as not worthy of being done in the first place - from now on, life proceeds in my time, at my pace. Because time is swift and life is short, and one day all the things you once took for granted will not be there anymore. It's up to you to learn that lesson.
And Merry Christmas! I'll be having a glass of sherry tonight as I watch the film. Give it a watch yourself. The critics seem to hate it. But what do they know? I never cared for it myself, didn't like the very idea of a Scrooge musical. But circumstances bring new perspectives and now I love it. Do watch: It'll warm the cockles of your heart.
